Part 15 (1/2)

'It is!' retorted the doctor, who could not bear contradiction. 'She ought to know better, and I shall tell her so. Go home at once, Sister, and go to bed and stay there!'

'I am quite able to work,' protested Sister Giovanna quietly. 'There is nothing the matter with me.'

Still the doctor glared at her.

'Show me your tongue!' he said roughly.

The nun meekly opened her mouth and put out her little tongue: it was as pink as a rose-leaf. The doctor grunted, grabbed her wrist and began to count the pulse. Presently he made another inarticulate noise, as if he were both annoyed and pleased at having been mistaken.

'Something on your mind?' he asked, more kindly--'some mental distress?'

'Yes.' The word was spoken reluctantly.

'I am sorry I was impatient,' he said, and his large brown eyes softened behind his round spectacles as he turned to enter the sick-room.

It was not his business to ask what had so greatly disturbed the peace of Sister Giovanna.

CHAPTER X

When the Princess Chiaromonte was getting well, she asked some questions of her doctor, to which he replied as truthfully as he could. She inquired, for instance, whether she had been delirious at the beginning, and whether she had talked much when her mind was wandering, and his answers disturbed her a little. As sometimes happens in such cases, she had disjointed recollections of what she had said, and vague visions of herself that were not mere creations of her imagination. It was like a dream that had not been quite a dream; opium-eaters know what the sensation is better than other men. Under the influence of laudanum, or the pipe, or the hypodermic, they have talked brilliantly, but they cannot remember what the conversation was about; or else they know that they have been furiously angry, but cannot recall the cause of their wrath nor the person on whom it was vented; or they have betrayed a secret, but for their lives they could not say who it was to whom they told it. The middle-aged woman of the world felt that her reputation was a coat of many colours, and her past, when she looked back to it, was like a badly-constructed play in which the stage is crowded with personages who have little connection with each other. There was much which she herself did not care to remember, but much more that no one else need ever know; and as she had never before been delirious, nor even ill, the thought that she had now perhaps revealed incidents of her past life was anything but pleasant.

'It is so very disagreeable to think that I may have talked nonsense,'

she said to the doctor, examining one of her white hands thoughtfully.

'Do not disturb yourself about that,' he answered in a rea.s.suring tone, for he understood much better than she guessed. 'A good trained nurse is as silent about such accidental confessions as a good priest is about intentional ones.'

'Confession!' cried the Princess, annoyed. 'As if I were concealing a crime! I only mean that I probably said very silly things. By the bye, I had several nurses, had I not? You kept changing them. Do you happen to know who that Sister Giovanna was, who looked so ill? You sent her back after two days, I think, because you thought she might break down. She reminded me of a niece of mine whom I have not seen for years, but I did not like to ask her any questions, and besides, I was much too ill.'

'I have no idea who she was before she entered the order,' the doctor answered.

He was often asked such futile questions about nurses, and would not have answered them if he had been able to do so. But in asking information the Princess was unwittingly conveying it, for it flashed upon him that Sister Giovanna was perhaps indeed that niece of whom she spoke, and whom she was commonly said to have defrauded of her fortune; the nun herself had told him of the sick woman's delirious condition, and he remembered her looks and her admission that she was in mental distress. All this tallied very well with the guess that her aunt had made some sort of confession of her deed while her mind was wandering, and that she now dimly recalled something of the sort. He put the theory away for future consideration, and left the Princess in ignorance that he had thought of it or had even attached any special meaning to her words.

She was far from satisfied, however, and made up her mind to follow up the truth at all costs. As a first step, she sent a generous donation to the Convent of the White Sisters, as soon as she was quite recovered; and as her illness had not been serious enough to explain such an important thank-offering, she wrote a line to say that she had never been ill before, and had been so much impressed by the care she had received that she felt she must really do something to help such an excellent inst.i.tution. It would give her keen pleasure to visit the hospital, she said in conclusion, but that was no doubt too great a favour to ask.

In thanking her, the Mother Superior replied that it would be no favour at all, and that the Princess would be welcome whenever she chose to send word that she was coming. On the day following that, the Mother told Sister Giovanna what had happened, and with characteristic directness asked what she thought about her aunt's charity.

'It is very kind of her,' answered the young nun in that monotonous, businesslike tone which all religious use when speaking of an apparently charitable action for the motive of which they are not ready to vouch, though they have no reasonable ground for criticism.

People of the world often speak in that voice when unexpectedly asked to give an opinion about some person whom they dislike but do not dare to abuse.

The little white volcano flared up energetically, however.

'I hate that sort of answer!' she cried, with a delicate snort.

Sister Giovanna looked at her in surprise, but said nothing.

'I cannot refuse the money,' said the Mother Superior, 'but I heartily wish I could! She has given it in order to come here and to be well received if she chooses to come again. I am sure of that, and she can have no object in coming here except to make mischief for you. It may be wicked of me, but I do not trust that lady in the least! Do you?'

She asked the question suddenly.